The explosive growth of e-commerce, Internet-based businesses, and multimedia streaming is creating an insatiable demand for network bandwidth. At the same time, new network-enabling technologies are fueling the desire for bandwidth by opening up new possibilities for its use. This in turn has accelerated the emergence of more data-intensive applications, which are further fueling the demand for bandwidth. This cycle is driving a spiraling demand for bandwidth and the technology to support and deploy this bandwidth.
Until recently it was a given that data sometimes did not get through or packet delivery might be sporadic or only at a best-effort rate. However, with the accelerating rise in the level of complexity and sophistication in e-commerce, real-time transaction processing, and media streaming, this is no longer acceptable. Service levels must now be defined and adhered to. While “Quality of Service” (QoS) is a concept with a nominal standards-body derived definition, the requirements for Extranet/Intranet networking services are driving QoS towards metrics which are clearly measurable, verifiable, and reportable.
Furthermore, meeting these QoS metrics is becoming a stringent requirement for service providers to meet their contractual obligations. Thus, Quality of Service and the measurement and assurance of QoS have taken a significant role in defining future network architecture requirements. This has in turn created new traffic engineering challenges for network service providers. There is now a need to be able to guarantee a minimum bandwidth across shared network infrastructures. Customers require these guarantees to ensure the proper performance of latency and/or jitter sensitive applications such as Voice-over-IP (VoIP) and for bandwidth-intensive applications such as streaming multimedia. Designing an architecture that can meet this requirement is an engineering challenge. Integrating this architecture with the unpredictability and underestimated capacity of the public Internet becomes even more of a challenge.
Business customer requirements for network services are becoming increasingly sophisticated and stringent. The salient features such as network reliability, physical and logical security, resource availability, network configuration flexibility, service profile manageability, and application based QoS networked elements are prerequisites for real-time business applications. To meet such requirements, the underlying network platform should have multifaceted features and functionality. The capacity of the transport network should be not only large enough to accommodate future growth, but also flexible and scalable so as to be apportioned on a dynamic, on-demand basis. Additionally, the platform should support protocol Layer 3 routing as well as protocol Layer 2 switching in order to accommodate different customer network architectures and protocols.